thanks for the info mike. as i was playing with it some more, some other stuff came up:

i am trying to create the equivalent of a wendy filter. so i am removing bands i dont want to hear (i.e. not artist = "band that sucks" and not genre = "sucky genre", etc). i did this on a soup tagged by artist, and it synced fine. however, when it booted up the next time, jemplode found playlists with 0 refs, and added them to the root.

i added a refs>0 statement in the search, but still have the problem.

also, are the searches order dependent? i tried doing the following sequence to generate a soup: filter on artist first, then adding the tag, then adding another search for refs>0. even with that, i am still getting blank playlists when i reboot the rio.

as long as i dont resync after jemplode adds the blank playlists, then the playlists on the rio look correct (i.e. no blanks).

hopefully, this makes sense.
thanks
-ted